wrong, wrong, and wrong.

good to know if i ever suffer brain damage, i can easily get a job at a convenience store.

you mean we're not even doing Contemporary American Negro right??

the summer before my senior year in high school, i had the opportunity to study music at a prestigious boarding school in massachusetts. this trip not only marked the first time i'd been on an airplane, the first time i'd been out of the state, and the first time i met native americans, it was also the first time i was in a position of not only finding myself a racial minority, but a socio-economic minority as well.

the only way i could go to this school was because i qualified for a scholarship which paid for my tuition, room and board. but i was attending summer session with many, many kids who didn't need anyone but mommy and daddy to write the checks to get their tuition paid.

while there studying violin, i had classes in individual performance, chamber groups, and voice and spent quite a bit of time with the kids who were there for the same reason. We ate together, saw each other all day in the same classes over and over, and performed in recitals and full concerts together. i was feeling pretty cozy with my mostly white and asian cohorts, palling around during breaks in class. and during one of these breaks, i got schooled. and i mean SCHOOLED!

one of my classmates, a cellist with long straight blond hair and hilfiger/lacoste gear was talking about an issue near and dear to her heart and the heart of her sister and mother: apartheid.

now i wasn't stupid, i knew what she was talking about. i'd heard of stephen biko. i'd heard of nelson and winnie mandela! but here's where i was slipping in my pimpin. apparently, that wasn't GOOD ENOUGH.

my classmate looked at me while telling a group of us about an anti-apartheid rally she and her family had attended and asked if I had been participating in such rallies. I said no. and then, i got chided: "YOU don't participate in apartheid rallies? don't YOU care about AFRICA??"

no, i'm not kidding you.

i was truly, seriously taken aback by her statement and at that time i couldn't really get past my reaction of "no this rich white girl did NOT just tell me i'm less black because she cares more about africa than i do!"

oh, yes she did.

and all of this brings me the curious case of Asher Roth. recently Asher, whose music is crap, made the news when he went to Rutgers for god knows what and decided to twat about it on Twatter...

"At Rutgers stirring up a ruckus. Been a day of rest and relaxation, sorry Twitter - hanging out with some nappy headed hoes..."

after getting chopped almost immediately for talking crazy, Asher apologized by stating he was just making fun of Don Imus and was sorry if he offended anyone!

let's follow Asher on the wild and wacky ride he calls logical reasoning:

in order to make fun of Don Imus, Asher decided to repeat that fucked up shit Imus said about the women's basketball team. because by doing that, it's going to cause people to laugh at IMUS.

oh. okay.

Asher has since used his dominant intelligence to shed some light on what exactly is wrong with black rappers today:

"When I dropped [the 'A Milli' freestyle] I thought, 'You guys are always going off about how much money you have. Do you realize what's going on in this world right now,'" Roth said. "All these black rappers - African rappers - talking about how much money they have. 'Do you realize what's going on in Africa right now?' It's just like, 'You guys are disgusting. Talking about billions and billions of dollars you have. And spending it frivolously, when you know, the Motherland is suffering beyond belief right now.'" (Canadian Press)

oh, yes he did. the white kid who hit the charts talking about how much he loves college is calling out black rappers...i mean...African rappers...for acting like life's a party while the MOTHERLAND is suffering.

just in case you're confused...because he can be confusing...dude is not talking about actual, literal, African rappers. no, no! he's calling black american rappers African. as if Baltimore is a township in Mozambique.

and with all this focus on the black/African/rapper problem of enjoyment of material things while the "Motherland" is suffering, why does he not look inside and wonder "why am i talking about how wonderful and carefree my life is in college when my brothers and sisters are suffering without educations and teeth in APPALACHIA" instead of chiding black people for not being more humble in solidarity with the entire continent of Africa, which is suffering, and i mean, suffering greatly.

what is this thing...this thing that causes the children to talk this way? where do they get this insufferable position of authority and knowledge from?

Jay Smooth and Dan Charnas had a talk about it, like to hear it, here it go:



i can only hope that Asher is arrogant enough to google his name everyday and will therefore stumble across this video. if so, i hope it sparks some self awareness. someone has got to stop him before he starts schooling black chicks on why it's a sad expression of self-hatred to relax our hair.

next time, maybe ihop?

in these tough economic times, it's completely normal for those of us who have avoided the unemployment chop to become hyper-sensitive regarding our work product. and depending on the culture of the work environment, even the simplest criticism can cause a marked increase in resentment and defensiveness.

and then there are cases like that of Yakeisha Ward.

MANNING, S.C. -- A Waffle House employee has been arrested and accused of shooting a customer who complained about the service.

The Clarendon County Sheriff's Office says 29-year-old Yakeisha Ward of Manning is charged with assault and battery with intent to kill.

Deputies said Ward worked at a Waffle House restaurant in Manning and was involved in a fight about 4:30 a.m. Sunday. Lt. Tommy Burgess says the fight started when the customer complained about the quality of service in the crowded restaurant.

Burgess says Ward went to her van to get a gun. He says a 27-year-old woman was hit in the arm.

worked?? awww, don't tell me on top of getting arrested, Yakeisha got fired too! so perhaps an addendum needs to be added to the Waffle House Employee Handbook: don't shoot customers.

the thing that stuck out immediately for me is the fact that most Waffle House restaurants are about as big as shoeboxes. If Yakeisha had missed her target, that bullet could have ricocheted around the inside of that place like a pinball machine.

she could have killed everybody in there!

so let this be a lesson to us all: you may hate your job, hate your coworkers, and even hate your slow computer. but you'll hate going to prison for assault and battery with intent to kill even more.

you dizzy yet?

so, yesterday i was reading a blog on the website Jezebel in which one of the writers responded to a lambasting written about the site and it's writers by Linda Hirshman on Salon's new offshoot feminist blog XX.

in Hirshman's piece, she discusses her problem with Jezebel, its impact on its readers, and how the attitudes and behaviors they seem to advocate actually do more harm to the feminist movement than they may realize. one sticking point in particular for Hirshman is the Jezebel writers' stance that a woman who is raped is not obligated to report the crime but yet rail at institutions for not doing more to decrease instances of rape:

"Moe Tkacik was apparently date-raped and says she has had unprotected sex, and Tracie Egan, in her words, 'decided to go home with someone I never would have, had my vision not been impaired by 14 hours of drinking.' Jezebel editor Megan Carpentier was raped and did not report it to the police. ...How can writers who justify not reporting rape criticize the military for not controlling…rape? It’s incoherent."

"Suggest that women report the men who rape them for the sake of future victims, say, or that women should be asked why they stay with the men who abuse them, or urged to leave them, and the Jezebels go ballistic. Judgmental, judgmental!"

Megan wrote for Jezebel in response "Sigh. As many know, today a Slate writer offered that someone assaulted at the age of 17 who didn't report it should never be taken seriously or, really, allowed to write about the subject. What?"

she then goes on to discuss the problematic conclusions Hirshman comes to based on her readings of Jezebel and basically concludes:

"I assume that Hirshman's attack — based solely on my experience with sexual assault and my audacity to suggest that haranguing victims of violence to leave their abusive partners might not be helpful — isn't meant to show the Jezebel audience that I'm not to be trusted to speak about sexual assault in the military or anything else. I assume it is an attempt to shut me up. And as much as she throws the occasional firebomb at Ross Douthat or Chris Matthews, she seems to save her real rhetorical ire for women with opinions different than her. "

i love how smart women duke it out in a tsunami of words instead of razorblades and high heel shoes...

so to sum up: a writer on a blog wrote about writers on another blog, saying they didn't have the right to write about the problem of rape because they'd been raped and didn't even report it.
and the writers of that other blog said "hey, just because we all got raped and didn't report it don't mean we can't talk about the problems of rape! get it right!"

i can dig it....and yet....

via Jezebel, same day, in the post How Hair Affects African American Girls' Self-Esteem:

Taking a cue from Chris Rock's documentary Good Hair, today's Tyra examined how black women — including little girls — feel about their hair, and the (at times painful) lengths they go to alter it.

I have no idea what it's like to have hair that's considered difficult to manage (aside from flatness), but it was easy to empathize with the little girls on this show because, as women, most of us are subjected to the idea that we're not measuring up to certain standards of beauty, whatever they may be. And while I could understand Tyra's outrage over a mother who chemically relaxes her 3-year-old daughter's hair, TyTy's stance on the hair issue was confusing, since she's just about the weaviest person on the planet; in fact, she regularly gives white women weaves on America's Next Top Model.

you still with me? ok, once again from the top:

a writer who blogs about writers on another blog, saying they shouldn't be talking about the problem of rape because those writers were raped and didn't report it is TOTALLY OUT OF POCKET.

but then those same writers write about a women on a tv show who's topic is loving your hair texture, stating she shouldn't really be taken seriously because she wears a weave.

being raped, not reporting it, and then complaining about rape, according to Hirshman, is "incoherent."

having a weave, giving white women weaves, then hosting a show whose topic is hair's impact on african american girls' self esteem, according to Jezebel, is "confusing."

to quote Megan: "what?"

why, that's just plain old hypocrisy, ammiryt?! stop it right now.

just an fyi...erm....just because you see a black woman wearing a weave, it's not an automatic that she's doing it because she hates her own hair texture or believes straighter hair is "good hair." and i certainly don't think it disqualifies her from stating her opinion about what the western standard of beauty is doing to the psyche of young black girls and women in this country.

but we all knew that, right? .........ammiryt?

What's WRONG with these People??

you know what i hate? i hate it when you find out about a terrible deed committed by another person, tell someone else, and then realize that makes YOU the horrible person. you know, like when you find out your neighbor has been beating his child with his dog, and you call the proper authorities, and then someone stands on your lawn screaming that you must really really hate dogs and kids, otherwise why did you tell! hater!

what's that? you say that makes no sense? weeeeeeeeeeeeelll, it does if you're MARY CHENEY!



In an interview on Fox News, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney sharply criticized the new administration for agreeing to release photographs depicting alleged abuses at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration.

"I think it is really appalling that the administration is taking this step," she said in the interview. "Clearly what they are doing is releasing images that show American military men and woman in a very negative light."

"I have heard from families of service members from families of 9/11 victims this question about when did it become so fashionable for us to side, really, with the terrorists," she continued.
(CNN)

mary cheney believes that by releasing photos of abuses by the US, the current administration is siding with terrorists. because that's showing the world that we...like to torture people...too?

is it siding with terrorists because it's showing a sense of simpatico because the methods of torture are so similar?

or is it just siding with torture because it is once again highlighting what it is about the administration of Dubya and Satan that makes people try to throw shoes at them during press conferences?

i think i see what side of the street mary's standing on. but can someone tell her that the rhetoric she's using is so dated, it's laughable? mary, really? "siding with terrorist," for real??

you know all is lost when you get chopped by Fergie:

i'm so 3000 and 8/
you're so 2000 and late.

bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbburrittooooo!

in a spinach tortilla wrap.

when your backseat smells like pickles.

there is a car rental commercial that shows older cars parked and lonely wondering why their drivers prefer to rent cars than drive them. as the voice-over drones over the many reasons for the preference, one always pops out:

"maybe it's because your backseat smells like pickles."

the whole commercial is poking fun at the many thoughts that go through (usually) a woman's mind when she's trying to figure out why her mate has cheated on her. and that particular line always reminds me of a comment i once read on a blog. allow me to paraphrase:

"you gonna have hard time finding a man and keeping him from cheating on you especially if your pussy stinks!"

harsh.

but rest easy! the Chinese have invented a device to help regular girls become ladies of the etiquette!

your backseat never has to smell like pickles again!